Distinctions without separation. . .

I really do abhor the way the world and even those within the pale of Christianity have so easily made a separation between Christ and Christianity and Christianity and the Church. It is a distinction to be kept but without placing distance between them so that they appear insulated from and indifferent toward each other.  That is a problem we face from the world but that it arises from within Christian teachers and people is something hard to accept.

All the attention given to spiritual but not religious has been baptized into the idea that you know Christ without being Christian (creedal) and that Christianity has little to do with the Church or going to church.  I wonder how the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would feel about discounting the internal from the external, the man of faith from the Church where Christ is at work distributing still His gifts.  It strikes me as a kind of lukewarm Christianity that the Father abhors and we all know what Revelation says about the lukewarm.

How is it that you testify to Christ without speaking also of the Church?  How is it that you can speak of Christianity without speaking of the Church?  Scripture does not speak in this way.  The fathers do not speak in this way.  Why do we?  Why are we so reticent to speak of abiding in Christ as abiding in His Church, living by His Word preached and His Holy Sacraments administered?  What kind of Gnosticism speaks in this way?  Surely this is not the faith of the martyrs whose blood has been the seedbed of the Church's faithfulness for nearly two millenia!

How would you "bring" someone to Christ without also bringing them to the Church?  Tell me how it is that Christ lives among us in imagination or desire but without the tangible words of Scripture or the concrete elements of the Sacraments?  What kind of Christ are we bringing the nations to if we lead them to Jesus but not to the Church, His bride, for whom He died and who is washed clean in His blood?  Where there is no opportunity (desert island or stalag or gulag), Christ will not desecrate His name, Immanuel, by abandoning the faithful.  But where there is the community, gathered around the Word and Table of the Lord, Christ will not fail His promise by eschewing the Word preached or the Sacraments rightly administered according to His institution.

At some point we must stop doing theology by emergency.  Emergency baptisms or emergency situations are fun to postulate -- what is the minimum and how do you know for sure -- but who among us lives in the emergency?  Almost none, I would presume.  We live where the Church has been planted and we are given no freedom to disdain the promise of Christ kept within the gathering of the baptized to hear His voice and sup at His table.  We must stop this endless and foolhardy game of trying to figure out how little of the Church and the faith and the means of grace you can have while still being saved.  Who among the people of God who have gone without have done so by choice?  Who among the people of God who have been forced into such poverty have not returned to the joy and edification of Christ's holy house as soon as it was possible?

Lutherans are too smug in their assertion of the division between the invisible and visible Church.  This is not the language of life but the painful admission that the Church remains when you can no longer see her and that the numbers of the faithful are not the same as those who you can see or count in the snapshot of the moment.  We don't get any comfort from an invisible Church if we have one with the certain marks in our midst.  No, then our confidence must apply to the voice of the Word and the Sacraments of life and worship supplied by our Lord and through which His promise lives among us doing what He has said He will do.

Unfortunately, Lutherans are not alone in this smugness.  Everyone from evangelicals to Rome seems to speak and act as if our life together were optional and the Church can be kept in your mind and heart every bit as well as it is in your presence.  If this were not the case, we would not see the great gulf between the numbers of those who say they belong and those who are there on a Sunday morning.  If our jealous God is okay with once a month or so or even less at the high and holy days of Christmas and Easter, He has been tamed and rendered rather impotent in the process.  No, if you want to hear the voice of Christ, go to Church.  If you want to see His hands at work to kill and give life that death cannot steal, reach into the baptismal water.  If you want to know the measure of His grace, open your mouth and confess what lives in your heart and mind and see what the Lord does to you for such a confession.  If you want to eat tomorrow's bread, tasting in the moment the fullness of eternity, then open your mouth to receive the body and blood of our Lord,  Just don't point to the sky to the Jesus who is out there somewhere.  We do not need a God who is everywhere.  But we cannot live without a God who is somewhere.  We bow not as symbol to what is not there but as confession to who is among us.  The Immanuel who began in Matthew's Gospel with that name has kept it at the end.  He did not say He will be with us or will come if called but that He fulfills His Immanuel promise by the power of His Word and Sacraments.

Man centered worship does not have to look like a variety show with comedic monologue along with a few life tips and a teary eyed video to tug at our heartstrings.  It comes along just as well by saying that Church is optional, faith is solely individual, and Christianity is something other than its creed and confession formed from Scripture.  If Christ lives only in the heart or imagination then why bother with this Christmas thing at all?  And if He does live among the faithful through His Word and Sacraments, then what stupidity turns up its nose at being assembled at His call to receive Him who comes?